Dr. Nitin Agarwal, assistant professor of information science at the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT), has been named to the “20 in Their 20s” list by Arkansas Business magazine, a weekly statewide business publication.

The award honors “creative, talented individuals who have found early success in their profession but also show future potential to step up as a leader in Arkansas business or politics.”

Agarwal’s research interests include social computing, knowledge extraction in social media and Web 2.0, data mining, machine learning, semantic web mining, and privacy.

The National Science Foundation recently sponsored research on “Cyber-collective Movements: Novel Socio-computational Approaches in Studying the Blogosphere,” which Agarwal is undertaking in collaboration with Dr. Rolf Wigand, the Maulden-Entergy Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science and Management. The research is funded in part by the NSF’s Social-Computational Systems Program and Human Centered Computing Program.

Agarwal received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Computing and Informatics at Arizona State University in August 2009, and he received his bachelor’s degree in information technology from the Indian Institute of Information Technology in May 2003.